Marketing gurus, Kellyann Lamb and Scott Gagner become
a visual resource to meteorologists everywhere...
Educational eye candy. I love it. When I think of flashy videos that can teach you, or that promote a marketing agenda in a fun way, I think of the stylized instructional film on the
Indiana Jones Adventure ride. You walk through tunnels and ruins in a hidden archaeological dig, and, to help you buy into the idea that you are an explorer—and that you need to be safe on the ride—there’s a video about how you’re supposed to work the seatbelts on the mock jeeps. It’s a brilliant production and keeps with the theme.
Creativity in stylized films and animations aren’t new to the marketing world. It’s not just about Disneyland or Las Vegas where themes can be overbearing in a sort if Willy Wonka landscape of animated information.
Stylized marketing and creativity can even reach right into your home via the Internet. Noveltown has its own
Flash intro page that we hope to expand upon. Ken Seward of
Solomon Grundy Film from Savannah College is working on that. As long as you have the right kind of creative team, Flash can be a versatile tool to use when creating interfaces and productions that need some extra punch.
With the release of Acrobat 8 comes the stylized Flash piece,
“The Ultimate Formula.” You can watch the instructional video on Adobe’s promotional page for their new version of Acrobat. Or you can go to the site of the marketers who developed the video:
Visual Resource.
What’s the animation meant to do? Teach people that Adobe 8 can help streamline marketing processes along with Acrobat Connect. Connect documents, people, ideas…
The Adobe site reads:
Whether you're in product marketing, public relations, brand development, or corporate communications, you face pressure to work faster, juggle multiple projects simultaneously, and generate high-quality work on tight deadlines. Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional software can help by streamlining and expediting many of the creative processes managed by marketing professionals, enabling you to gain control and finish projects faster.Cool, but I wanted to know more about the creative process with Visual Resource… so I explored further.
Here’s my interview with Visual Resource President Kellyann Lamb and art director Scott Gagner:
Noveltown: Visual Resource had to create a Flash animation that captured the corporate world in a light-hearted way. Yet, this is a corporate product. How did you juggle ideas that some could deem offensive, and then storyboard those out?
Scott Gagner: When Adobe signed on they saw what we’d done was often over the top and pretty innovative. They knew what they were getting into. And that takes a lot of trust. They wanted us to have fun with our designs and were willing to take the ride.
There were subtle things along the way in the animation to make sure Adobe knew we weren’t poking fun or saying they were old fashioned. Really, those variations are barely perceptible on listener part. The character takes a specific tone in the voice-over when walking through the demo. It’s not as over the top in the wrapper section intros.
Kellyann: Adobe is pretty sophisticated in what’s going on in the marketing realm. It takes a lot to bedazzle them… from there we had a lot of creative license… We do have a relationship with Adobe brand information within their organization that was successful, so we were introduced to product marketers. Focusing on interactive media, they wanted something savvy and different. It became a great opportunity to be challenged and to wow Adobe and this vertical market…
Noveltown: Within the animation piece is the idea that PDFs have come a long way, yet the style is an overly nice 1950s science teacher caught on film. What’s the relationship with progressive knowledge and marketing style?
Scott: We were showing modern innovation with drastic contradictory old style. A juxtaposition of old and new creates something unique. We wanted something timeless and unique… The style of the piece is very rich. There are a lot of elements you can draw from and build in the humor factor. Everyone has seen these kinds of films in Driver’s Education and Heath Education classes…
Noveltown: How important is Flash? Does it revolutionize the Web, or is Flash just fancy eye candy for information?
Scott: The way we look at Flash is it’s just another tool. It comes down to the big idea, in the case of Noveltown or anybody. If you only needed three panels with an animated gif, then you don’t necessarily need Flash. There are nice advantages. Low impact as far as bandwidth and crisp edged vectors…
Kellyann: We’re innovative… it’s most important to come up with a solid concept to get clients results. It’s more of who are you trying to reach and how are they going to respond. We do Flash quite a bit, but it’s not a prerequisite.
Noveltown: Who is Doctor Arnold modeled after? Is there any secret science teacher information here, or is the doctor one of the Visual Resource staff used as a cut-out animation? Any info on the artistic process?
Scott: We didn’t make it an in-house joke. The piece needed a universal relevance. We cast it to find the right person, a guy who could fit the character, and hearken back to their old math teachers.
Artistically there are subtleties of collage and cut-out.
We tried to embody with nerdy scientific values. We used different proportions of head to body ratios to accentuate brainy. That includes the way we cut his jaw out as we used collage styles. We really associate with Terry Gilliam’s animations from Monty Python. That gave this character a stiffness—we didn’t want any fluidity. And so we sort of created our own world where physics and anatomy don’t apply: he sort of slides from side to side…
Noveltown: How will this animation be viewed culturally around the world? Will there be any problems interpreting the humor?
Scott: During the creative process the response was overwhelmingly positive regardless of cultural backgrounds. We’re internationally aware so that no offensive hand signal or anything like that was used. There’s an international universality…
Noveltown: What’s “The Ultimate Formula” going to do for Visual Resource in the long run?
Kellyann: Exposure in the marketplace about our creativity as a company. Today everyone is getting influenced by email, TV ads, and so on…We need to step out and have an outreach that is entertaining and effective. This was a great opportunity for that.
There's an apparent creative culture that exists with Visual Resource
that doesn't exist in many marketing and advertising companies/departments. Oops, did I say that? It's true. Just ask Kellyann and Scott about avocado art...
Noveltown: And your company blog? When is that starting up?
Kellyann: Six months…! There’s a diverse group at Visual Resource. We want a forum where different team members can post things like what they were inspired by…
Labels: Adobe Systems, animation, blog, corporate creativity, Flash animation, marketing, news, Noveltown, Visual Resource
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